Christian Physicalism?

“The Incorporeality of the Soul in Patristic Thought.” In Christian Physicalism?

Sadly it's an image scan so can't past abstract. However to draw on a quote mentioned in the above, "the conception of a soul as captive of the body in the prison of its body is quite un-Biblical".

It does recall an argument I had heard discussed in a Catholicism class I sat in on one day b/c my advisor taught it. The idea is that souls as ghostly dualistic entities are based on a misconception of Scripture deriving from Greek thoughts about shades in Hades...Biblical thought however would suggest when you die you really do die and await resurrection. The miracle is not just that you live once more but that you are the *same* person despite the discontinuity in your existence...

It's an interesting argument as it gives credence to the idea that you can preserve yourself through an uploaded copy...not necessarily in Turing Machine but perhaps "You" 3-D printed onto a silicon brain or transference of quantum level behaviors into some kind of lattice structure (the latter suggested by Hammeroff of Orch-OR fame...)

Related -> An argued for distinction between animal souls and human souls (aka "No Dogs Go To Heaven"):

Body and Soul: Conflicting Images of the Self in Patristic Anthropology

“The Incorporeality of the Soul in Patristic Thought.” In Christian Physicalism?

Sadly it's an image scan so can't past abstract. However to draw on a quote mentioned in the above, "the conception of a soul as captive of the body in the prison of its body is quite un-Biblical".

It does recall an argument I had heard discussed in a Catholicism class I sat in on one day b/c my advisor taught it. The idea is that souls as ghostly dualistic entities are based on a misconception of Scripture deriving from Greek thoughts about shades in Hades...Biblical thought however would suggest when you die you really do die and await resurrection. The miracle is not just that you live once more but that you are the *same* person despite the discontinuity in your existence...

It's an interesting argument as it gives credence to the idea that you can preserve yourself through an uploaded copy...not necessarily in Turing Machine but perhaps "You" 3-D printed onto a silicon brain or transference of quantum level behaviors into some kind of lattice structure (the latter suggested by Hammeroff of Orch-OR fame...)

Related -> An argued for distinction between animal souls and human souls (aka "No Dogs Go To Heaven"):

Body and Soul: Conflicting Images of the Self in Patristic Anthropology

Sci!!

Sci!!

Malf!

[Laird]

Sci!!

My sentiments exactly!! Sci. Dude. You've been missed. Where've ya bin?

My sentiments exactly!! Sci. Dude. You've been missed. Where've ya bin?

Not to ignore the original post but yes, I agree with this. Good to see you back among us.

My sentiments exactly!! Sci. Dude. You've been missed. Where've ya bin?

Work and family really, nothing too exciting but quite time consuming.

Wish I could tell you I had been on some incredible Dorothy-in-Oz-like Astral Vision Quest, but really just mundane obligations. :-)

Going back to the original post, my memory was jogged a little to recall the assertion that reincarnation was a tenet of Christian thought until certain passages were alleged to have been removed from the bible (Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 553). However, this is hotly contested by Christian scholars though we might cynically add that they would say that, wouldn't they?

The link I inserted above mentions Origen being the likely source of this idea of Christian belief in reincarnation though again the article argues that this too is a mistaken understanding of Origen. So I did a bit of searching on what Origen actually thought of the soul and whether it was considered to be incarnate and spiritual or, as your original post suggests, entirely of the body and that resurrection is actual bodily resurrection - prompting, for me, horror movie images of cadavers clawing their way out of the grave. 

So Origen does seem to have concluded that the soul is disincarnate and spiritual as opposed to a kind of fluid in the body (at the time, it seems, there was a debate about whether the soul is the blood).

The chief accusations against Origen’s teaching are the following: making the Son inferior to the Father and thus being a precursor of Arianism, a 4th-century heresy that denied that the Father and the Son were of the same substance; spiritualizing away the resurrection of the body; denying hell, a morally enervating universalism; speculating about preexistent souls and world cycles; and dissolving redemptive history into timeless myth by using allegorical interpretation. None of these charges is altogether groundless. At the same time there is much reason to justify Jerome’s first judgment that Origen was the greatest teacher of the early church after the Apostles.

[Laird]

Not to ignore the original post

Going back to the original post

Right you are to draw attention to the need to pay the thread's author the respect of responding to the content of his opening post.

“The Incorporeality of the Soul in Patristic Thought.” In Christian Physicalism?

Interesting. St Gregory of Nyssa's perspective as summarised between pages 13 and 15 was most agreeable to me although not without problems: like many (most?) Christian theologians, he distinguishes between human, animal, and plant souls. Which brings me to:

Related -> An argued for distinction between animal souls and human souls (aka "No Dogs Go To Heaven"):

Body and Soul: Conflicting Images of the Self in Patristic Anthropology

This stuff riles me. Assertion without reasonable basis or at most on the basis of an impoverished and contrived argument or appeal to scripture that thoughtlessly ignores the evidence, witness:

“There are two different kinds of souls. One is the irrational soul, which is that of animals. The other is rational, belonging to human beings”.

Pray tell, how could an "irrational" soul survive in a complex natural world where generally it must not only fend for itself and avoid being preyed upon but attract a mate, reproduce, and then feed, teach, and protect its young, in the process solving a host of challenging problems?

In this is the template for all manner of supremacist thinking.

Matthew chapter 11 verse 11 thru 14, seem to have jesus calling john the Baptist, the reincarnation of the prophet Elias

Thou this seems contradicted by john chapter 1 verse 19